The Strategic Role of the Sales Force: Perceptions of Senior Sales Executives

Current models of sales force strategy imply formidable information processing demands, which leads us to take a cognitive approach to studying the issue of sales force strategy. We focus on how top-level executives use mental models of sales force performance to simplify the issue of sales force strategy. We interviewed 74 senior executives responsible for their firms’ selling function using the repertory grid approach, as this methodology has been shown to be particularly effective at uncovering the collective cognitive maps on which executives’ decisions and behaviors are based. Executives identified a broad set of 37 strategic concepts that they felt distinguish the sales force efforts of directly competing companies. A second set of sales executives classified the 37 concepts into capabilities, resources, and organizational context concepts. Based on the classification results and feedback from both sets of executives, we developed research propositions for examining sales force strategy and provide directions for future research.

Creating LaTeX documents from within Stata using texdoc

At least since Thomas Piketty's best-selling "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2014, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press), percentile shares have become a popular approach for analyzing distributional inequalities. In their work on the development of top incomes, Piketty and collaborators typically report top-percentage shares, using varying percentages as thresholds (top 10%, top 1%, top 0.1%, etc.). However, analysis of percentile shares at other positions in the distribution may also be of interest. In this paper I present a new Stata command called pshare that estimates percentile shares from individual-level data and displays the results using histograms or stacked bar charts.

Die Bedeutung von Business Rules im Customer Relationship Management

Der Beitrag diskutiert Möglichkeiten zur Automatisierung von Kundenbeziehungsprozessen im Customer Relationship Management mit Hilfe von Business Rules. Anhand einer CRM-Architektur werden Anwendungsmöglichkeiten erörtert und am Beispiel einer Cross-Selling-Kampagne vertieft. Technische Aspekte werden dabei nicht im Detail betrachtet. Der Schwerpunkt liegt vielmehr in der Diskussion von Automatisierungs- und Integrationspotenzialen durch den Einsatz von Business Rules, wie sie in zunehmend individualisierten Kundenbeziehungen in Massenmärkten gegeben sind.

Assessing inequality using percentile shares

At least since Thomas Piketty's best-selling \Capital in the Twenty- First Century" (2014, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press), percentile shares have become a popular approach for analyzing distributional inequalities. In their work on the development of top incomes, Piketty and collaborators typically report top- percentage shares, using varying percentages as thresholds (top 10%, top 1%, top 0.1%, etc.). However, analysis of percentile shares at other positions in the distri- bution may also be of interest. In this paper I present a new Stata command called pshare that estimates percentile shares from individual-level data and displays the results using histograms or stacked bar charts.

Assessing inequality using percentile shares

At least since Thomas Piketty's best-selling "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2014, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press), percentile shares have become a popular approach for analyzing distributional inequalities. In their work on the development of top incomes, Piketty and collaborators typically report top-percentage shares, using varying percentages as thresholds (top 10%, top 1%, top 0.1%, etc.). However, analysis of percentile shares at other positions in the distribution may also be of interest. In this paper I present a new Stata command called -pshare- that estimates percentile shares from individual-level data and displays the results using histograms or stacked bar charts.

Trust and Reputation in Internet Auctions

Exchange between anonymous actors in Internet auctions corresponds to a one-shot prisoner's dilemma-like situation. Therefore, in any given auction the risk is high that seller and buyer will cheat and, as a consequence, that the market will collapse. However, mutual cooperation can be attained by the simple and very efficient institution of a public rating system. By this system, sellers have incentives to invest in reputation in order to enhance future chances of business. Using data from about 200 auctions of mobile phones we empirically explore the effects of the reputation system. In general, the analysis of nonobtrusive data from auctions may help to gain a deeper understanding of basic social processes of exchange, reputation, trust, and cooperation, and of the impact of institutions on the efficiency of markets. In this study we report empirical estimates of effects of reputation on characteristics of transactions such as the probability of a successful deal, the mode of payment, and the selling price (highest bid). In particular, we try to answer the question whether sellers receive a "premium" for reputation. Our results show that buyers are willing to pay higher prices for reputation in order to diminish the risk of exploitation. On the other hand, sellers protect themselves from cheating buyers by the choice of an appropriate payment mode. Therefore, despite the risk of mutual opportunistic behavior, simple institutional settings lead to cooperation, relatively rare events of fraud, and efficient markets.